Seven Things
Daniel Mills tagged me to name "seven things about my writing that you may not already know," which is the sort of thing I would normally agonize over for several days before unceremoniously dumping it onto the Internet in the middle of the night. However, I don't really have time for agonizing right now, so I'll just skip straight to unceremonious dumping. Here are the first seven things that came to mind that might possibly qualify:
- While I don't really have a process--it changes pretty drastically from story to story--I try, whenever deadlines permit, to write everything out completely at least twice. I find that in the course of writing it the second time, I catch things that I wouldn't have noticed if I had simply been revising.
- I used to write to music compulsively, but these days I find that I can't do it. Just about any kind of music seems to kill the rhythm of writing, with the recent notable exception of John Carpenter's Lost Themes.
- Nathan Ballingrud once lamented that he couldn't decide if he wanted to be William Faulkner or Robert E. Howard. (I believe I got those names right, Nathan?) I told him that I was pretty sure I just wanted to be Robert E. Howard (though Mike Mignola or E.F. Benson would probably have been better examples), and he basically told me to go out and do the best job of that I could. I've been trying to live by that advice ever since.
- I've known that I wanted to write pretty much forever, but probably the biggest turning point in my development as a writer came when I was introduced to Roger Zelazny through his Chronicles of Amber books. Something about Zelazny's prose transformed me from someone who wanted to write, into someone who wanted to write better.
- Though it is, I think, somewhat unfashionable to admit such a thing right now, my writing is heavily influenced by film, though less, I hope, in the form of "here's a thinly-veiled fanfic of my favorite TV show" or "here's a story that I really wanted to be a screenplay but I figured I could sell it quicker this way" and more simply that years of watching and digesting movies has left an indelible stamp on my imagination. In his own version of this meme, Daniel mentioned that he was "critical of the influence of film on contemporary fiction," and went on to enumerate a number of reasons, all of which made good sense. One of those was that "the first-person tense is eliminated." A look over my stories shows that I am, at least, not in any danger of that, since I dearly love writing in both first- and the much more oft-maligned second-persons.
- I currently write for a living, but the majority of my income doesn't come from fiction--licensed or otherwise--but from content work for various corporate websites and blogs. Which is not as much fun as writing about wax museums, lost films, and unlikely ghosts, but it does pay better, at least for now.
- If I were ever to print out some sort of motivational saying and have it framed above my desk to inspire me when I'm writing, it might well be a quote from Alan Moore's introduction to the second Hellboy collection, Wake the Devil: "The trick, the skill entailed in this delightful necromantic conjuring of things gone by is not, as might be thought, in crafting work as good as the work that inspired it really was, but in the much more demanding task of crafting work as good as everyone remembers the original as being."